How to Check Link Popularity in Google & Yahoo With PHP
Everyone knows that the best traffic you can get is organic, meaning people who come to your site naturally with genuine interest. Search engines like Google & Yahoo are notorious for placing a high value on the amount of websites that are linking to you. While their algorithms haven’t been completely unraveled yet, SEO specialists have a pretty good idea of how to make your site rank higher, and it usually starts with link building (assuming you have quality content first of course!).
The amount of links your site has indexed in Google & Yahoo can change often, so checking can be an arduous task. Luckily there are a ton of tools out there for this, but you’re not here for that, are you? You’re here because you want the code to run your own service, or maybe you want your own local copy of it, or maybe you just want to see how it works. The script below will check your backlinks in Google and Yahoo, as well as your Alexa rating. Feel free to modify and redistribute (non-commercially) as you see fit.
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// Setting the URL variable
$link = $_GET['url'];
// Google Backlinks
function fetch_google($uri) {
$uri = trim(eregi_replace('http://', '', $uri)); $uri = trim(eregi_replace('http', '', $uri));
$url = 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=link:'.$uri;
$v = file_get_contents($url);
preg_match('/of about \<b\>(.*?)\<\/b\>/si',$v,$r);
return ($r[1]) ? $r[1] : '0';
}
// Yahoo Inlinks
function fetch_yahoo($uri) {
$uri = trim(eregi_replace('http://', '', $uri)); $uri = trim(eregi_replace('http', '', $uri));
$url = 'http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://'.$uri.'&bwm=i&bwmf=s&bwmo=&fr2=seo-rd-se';
$v = file_get_contents($url);
preg_match('/of about \<strong\>(.*?) \<\/strong\>/si',$v,$r);
return ($r[1]) ? $r[1] : '0';
}
// Alexa Rating
function fetch_alexa($uri){
$uri = trim(eregi_replace('http://', '', $uri)); $uri = trim(eregi_replace('http', '', $uri));
$url = 'http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=snbamz&url=' . urlencode($uri);
$v = file_get_contents($url);
preg_match('/\<popularity url\="(.*?)" TEXT\="([0-9]+)"\/\>/si', $v, $r);
return ($r[2]) ? $r[2] : '0';
}
// Page Header
echo "<h2>Search Engine Popularity</h2>";
// Display Links and Information
if (isset($link)) {
echo "<strong>URL:</strong> " . $link . "<br />";
echo "<strong>Google Backlinks:</strong> " . fetch_google($link) . "<br />";
echo "<strong>Yahoo Backlinks:</strong> " . fetch_yahoo($link) . "<br />";
echo "<strong>Alexa Rating:</strong> " . fetch_alexa($link) . "<br />";
}
// Search Form
echo "<br />
<form action=\"linkcheck.php\" method=\"get\">
<input type=\"text\" name=\"url\" />
<input type=\"submit\" />
</form>";
?>